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From Heritage New Zealand Winter 2007

Holmes, the detective

by Noel O'Hare

He is passionate about calling things by their proper names. That is why he would like to change what we call our country.

George Holmes has had 60 corrected place names accepted. Photo: Ian Robertson

The origins of many place names have been largely forgotten. How many residents of Auckland, for example, know that Panmure was named after British soldier and politician Lord Panmure, aka Fox Maule-Ramsay, 11th Earl of Dalhousie? How many New Zealanders have had a cup of railway tea at Taumarunui on the main truck line without discovering that the name means “ large screen”. (Not as in plasma or LCD, but as in sun screen. According to A. W. Reed’s Place Names of New Zealand, when chief Pehi Taroa was dying he asked for a screen to be erected to shade him from the sun. “He later died before the work was completed, with the words ‘taumaru nui’ on his lips.”)

Unless we know the origin of place names, they are meaningless words on a map, says Wellington researcher George Holmes. Dubbed “the map detective” by the media, Holmes, a retired public servant, now devotes his life to restoring meaning to place names that commemorate people. Too often, he has discovered, they have fallen into disrepair, misspelt even on our official maps, obscuring their origins and rendering them meaningless.

Holmes has had 60 corrected place names accepted by the New Zealand Geographic Board since 1997 and more are in the pipeline. His successes include “mountain ranges, mountains, glaciers, peaks, localities, small hills and bits of hills, a lot of streams and creeks, a few coast features on points and bays”. What started as a hobby has become a vocation, a monumental task that he hopes one day will become a book, a supplement to the indispensable but incomplete Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Place Names It will be devoted entirely to places named after people. “I thought I’d call it People on the New Zealand Map.”

His passion for place names arose out of a study of English history. Taking pride of place on his bookshelves is the 15-volume Oxford History of England. “I was reading the book on English history in the 19th century, and I noticed there were a lot of familiar names cropping up, like Palmerston, Russell, Panmure, Raglan, Wellington. The names of all these chaps are on the map of New Zealand.”

He began to compile a list and “it snowballed like that”. Studying the map, he soon realised that some of the names must have been misspelt. For example, looking at the names of mountains in the Paparoa Range on the West Coast, it was obvious they’d been named after famous scientists: Mt Faraday, Mt Davy and so on. In that context Mt Priestly didn’t look right. Surely it had been named after Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen. “It looked ridiculous without the ‘e’,” says Holmes, and the Geographic Board eventually agreed to change it.

More often, it’s names commemorating relatively insignificant people that are misspelt, says Holmes.

He cites the example of Scholl Creek, near Wainuiomata. It was originally named after a Thomas Scholes who had a farm nearby. “The letters got scrambled into ‘Scholl’. Mr Scholes is buried in the cemetery in Wainuiomata. I feel happy to have revived his memory because he was not a well-known man.”

Holmes’s relentless cartographic ferreting makes work for the Geographic Board. Do they regard him as a nuisance? “I rather think they did at first. They were a bit mystified about the first couple of letters I sent them and wrote back asking what I expected them to do.” Holmes reminded the Geographic Board that one of its functions under the Act was to examine cases of doubtful spelling of place names and determine the spelling to be adopted on official maps. “I showed that there was a job to do and there’s still a job to do.” These days he believes the board regards him in a more favourable light. “Because I’ve given it good publicity, and it’s seen as doing a good job.”

It’s a daunting bureaucratic task applying to the board for a place name change. For Holmes, the writing of a submission can take a month. He eschews the use of computers and writes in long hand. A submission, his longest to date, for a change of name from Rewiti to Reweti ran to 40 pages. Chief Reweti Tamahiki was one of the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi and the area was named after him when he gifted the land to finish the railway line through to Helensville. Making the case for a name change can also involve considerable detective work, combing local histories for references, tracking down obituaries, obtaining copies of citizenship papers, wills, death certificates, burial records and other documentation, such as the prospectus of the New Zealand Company set up by Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

It takes six months for a place name change to be considered by the Geographic Board and, if provisionally approved, the public then has three months to object to the proposed change. When Holmes made a submission to change the spelling of the Gowan River near Murchison to the correct “Gowen” more than 40 local people objected. It would also have entailed the correction of the name of the township of Gowanbridge to Gowenbridge. “They were very cross about it and objected violently,” he says. Street, motel and shop signage would all have to be replaced, the locals complained. Robert James Gowen, a director of the New Zealand Company, memorialised in the town’s name, had after all never set foot in the country. The Geographic Board bowed to local pressure and left the name uncorrected.

Often, however, there is less of a fuss. Indeed, people who are descendants of those who were honoured with place names are usually very happy to have correct spelling officially recognised. Holmes cites the case of Charles Willberg, who worked for the Lands and Survey Department in Hokitika. “His perk for being an excellent map maker for the West Coast was that he had a mountain range, a mountain, a river and a glacier named after him. But unfortunately his name was misspelt four times on the map.” When his submission to correct “Wilberg” to “Willberg” was approved, Hilary Willberg, a great, great, great, granddaughter was delighted, she told the Dominion Post. “We’ve been aware of the mistake for many years but haven’t followed it through. It’s all down to someone else’s efforts. Hats off to Mr Holmes.”

It’s the lives behind the place names that fascinate Holmes and drive him to correct the misspellings. A place name, he says, is part of our heritage, so we might as well find out who the person was, how he spelt his name and whether or not it’s correct on the map. “It puts flesh on the bones of the names. Willberg, for example, was the second son of an Estonian count. Gowen ended up as secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society and developed several strains of rhododendrons.”

Unfortunately, many of the people commemorated in our place names had no connection with New Zealand and would probably have found it difficult to locate the country on a globe. Names were imposed on the landscape by colonial sycophants to curry favour with their betters back home. Thus J.C. Godley, of the Canterbury Association, named Christchurch after his old Oxford College and wrote home: “I hope my college is grateful for me having the future capital named after it.” The names of long-forgotten British soldiers and statesmen enshrined in our maps seem as out of place in the 21st century as quill pens and powdered wigs.

As a student of British history, Holmes does not have a problem with names that reflect our British heritage, but he does have a bee in his bonnet about the country’s name. “Meaningless misspelt mumbo jumbo – and it’s Dutch!” he explodes with indignation. “Is this a Dutch country? It’s an anachronism, a name given in the 17th century, 350 years ago, referring to a province in the Netherlands!” Without stepping ashore, Abel Tasman named it Nieuw Zeeland. “This is a first-class country, but we have a name with a spelling error in it. Is that good enough for New Zealand? I think not.”

This is one spelling error, though, that Holmes does not itch to correct. He wants to see the country adopt a new name that “is truly our own” such as Aotearoa. New Hawaiki also strikes him as a possibility. Names, however, haven’t exactly been our forte. North Island. South Island. Only in New Zealand.